Morano sends lies from UK Times and Daily Mail around the world

Get ready. Lies originating in the U.K. over the weekend in newspaper stories by Jonathan Leake of the Times and Jonathan Petre of the Mail on Sunday, are about to hit the contrarian echo chamber. As usual, Marc Morano is on the case, with his Climate Depot science fabrication clearinghouse claiming that “World may not be warming, say scientists” and “Phil Jones admits: There has been no global warming since 1995″.

But a cursory examination of the actual articles shows that not only are both claims false, but the articles themselves are chock full of other misleading statements. And reborn skeptic evangelist Jonathan Leake of the Times has not only selected highly dubious research, but has glossed over the fossil fuel industry ties of the researchers, especially those of economist Ross McKitrick. So, for the benefit of Leake and other journalists, I’ll also go over a few unsavoury facts about McKitrick that I didn’t get to last time.

Not that any of that matters to the contrarian blogosphere and the right-wing U.S. press who will no doubt embrace these latest supposedly fatal blows to climate science in the days to come.

In the article, Petre clarified that Jones actually said that “for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming”. That’s technically correct, but highly misleading when you consider the full response:

B. Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

Jones also said that the period from 1975 to 2009 had a “very similar trend to the period 1975-1998″, implying of course that the long-term trend has not budged over the last 10 years. Climate contrarians are concentrating on meaningless shorter-term trends once again, as has been observed countless times here and elsewhere.

In a real howler, Petre also claimed:

[Jones] also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.

In fact, Jones said the exact opposite and was at great pains to explain that if only volcanic and solar natural influences were in play in 1975-1998,” we might have expected some cooling over this period”. Probably, Petre meant to refer to two earler periods and not 1975-1998. But it’s revealing that no one at the Mail caught that outrageous howler either.

On the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), Petre was also dead wrong:

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

But Jones said nothing of the sort, and explicitly rejected the idea that debate about the MWP could shake the case for anthropogenic global warming:

H – If you agree that there were similar periods of warming since 1850 to the current period, and that the MWP is under debate, what factors convince you that recent warming has been largely man-made?

The fact that we can’t explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing – see my answer to your question D.

Petre noted reaction from unnamed “skeptics”:

Skeptics said this was the first time a senior scientist working with the IPCC had admitted to the possibility that the Medieval Warming Period could have been global, and therefore the world could have been hotter then than now.

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.

But it turns out the researchers cited include only one scientist, John Christy, along with economists Ross McKitrick and Terry Mills, and meteorologists (of the non-PhD variety) Joseph d’Aleo and Anthony Watts. Perhaps a rewrite is in order, although more honest references to ideologically driven economists and ignorant TV weathermen-turned-climate-bloggers would perhaps blunt the point Leake is trying so hard to make.

McKitrick’s screed in the National Post on the Keith Briffa’s Yamal tree-ring temperature reconstruction was a shameful piece of yellow journalism, containing a litany of misleading half-truths, and at least two outright falsehoods. McKitrick wrote about Briffa and dendroclimatologist Fritz Schweingruber :

Then in 2008 Briffa, Schweingruber and some colleagues published a paper using the Yamal series (again) in a journal called the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society …

[Steve McIntyre] quickly found a large set of 34 up-to-date core samples, taken from living trees in Yamal by none other than Schweingruber himself …

Why did he [Briffa] not fill out the Yamal data with the readily-available data from his own coauthor?

So it should surprise no one that McKitrick also let loose this whopper:

Two expert panels involving the U.S. National Academy of Sciences were asked to investigate, the U.S. Congress held a hearing, and the media followed the story around the world.

Excuse me? Did McKitrick just say the Wegman panel “involved the U.S. National Academy of Sciences”? Perhaps he had in mind Wegman’s three-year term as chairman of the Committee of Applied and Theoretical Statistics (CATS). But that committee is constituted under the National Research Council, a separate body. Not that it matters anyway – the Wegman panel had absolutely nothing to do with the National Academy (or CATS); in fact, as I showed recently, the Academy was resolutely opposed to the Barton-Whitfield investigation.

So any science journalist who wants to trash his own reputation in a hurry, should look no further than Ross McKitrick. If there’s any justice, that’s a lesson Jonathan Leake is learning right now.

Meanwhile, North American media looking for new angles on the old, tired contrarian talking points have a couple to choose from this week.

So let’s see who will be first off the mark in repeating each of the two fabrications described here. And this is where you, dear readers, come in. I’ve got two polls, one for each falsehood – let’s see if we can guess which media outlet will be first to play these particular games of transatlantic telephone. And be sure to let me know about any sightings of these pernicious falsehoods in the mainstream media.

[Update, Feb. 17: I’ve closed the polls below. It was hardly a fair fight, as it appears that FoxNews were on top pf this within hours of my post, if not before. I’ll be looking at mainstream media echoes of these latest variations on the “global warming has stopped” meme in a subsequent post (coming soon). ]

Essentially, a meteorologist is a physicist with an emphasis on fluid and gas dynamics.

A weather forecaster is a weather predictor and I teach my freshman non-science majors how to do this. By the end of one semester they can understand the models and data well enough to provide a pretty accurate three day forecast for any city in the US. They cannot, however, understand the underlying physics behind these models. Watts is in the same camp as my freshman students.

Follow the money. How much advertising revenue do these newspapers get from car manufacturers and oil companies? We should be told.Tom Harris.

[DC: I doubt that there is a direct connection between advertisers and falsehoods in the right-wing press. Rather I put it down to strong ideological bias and adroit behind-the-scenes action by sleazy PR operatives like Marc Morano and Tom Harris (to mention just two).

But certainly advertisers should be told in no uncertain terms that customers take a dim view of media outlets that permit lies – there is no other word – about climate science and climate scientists.

And I believe it’s time for scientists to fight back. I see two possible courses of action.

1) Individual scientists who have been maligned or whose views have been grossly misrepresented, should have no compunction about suing these despicable reporters and columnists, as well as the media outlets that print this tripe.

2) Even more important: The top scientific societies should speak out against the rising tide of disinformation – in particular the reprehensible falsehoods spewed forth almost every day now in the pages of the National Post and the Globe and Mail here in Canada, not to mention right-wing outlets around the world. ]

A local radio host in the San Francisco Bay area claimed, based on Mr. Leake’s article in the Sunday Times, that the science behind anthropogenic global warming was “unraveling.” I requested that he send me the article on which this claim was based, which he had posted on his blog, here:Leake’s London Times article deleted

Before I saw today’s post on DC, I wrote to the blog author/radio host/career counselor and pointed out the numerous errors and dubious reliability of the article’s sources. As you can see from the link above, the article was retracted in short order. Although the author has repeatedly questioned the science of global warming on his radio program and blog, to his credit, he removed the offending piece. I hope that in the future he will more carefully consider the sources of such anti-science propaganda pieces.

I have to give jones some real credit here, this may be the first time in years he is being honest. It takes a big man to admit when he is wrong and I am glad he chose life instead of the cowards way out by committing suicide.

It’s too bad that you don’t seem to be able to live up to the undeniable truth that Jones is now facing, namely that climate science has been highly exagerated.[DC: I’m going to stop you right there. Have you no shame?

No one should have to endure the vicious, baseless attacks that Phil Jones has been subjected to. And that includes your despicable suggestion.

Let’s get this straight once and for all.

Despite attempts in the denialosphere to twist and cherrypick Jones’s answers to leading questions into some sort of “confession” or “admission” of various contrarian talking points, the facts are as follows:

a) Phil Jones has not revised his views on any aspect of climate science, including attribution of recent warming or the Medieval Warm Period.
b) Phil Jones’s views on these subjects do not differ from the broad findings of the IPCC AR4 WG1 report.

I have had enough of your reprehensible commentary. You are no longer welcome here, and I apologize to other readers for being too patient with you in the past. Goodbye and good riddance. ]

Are you are incompetent in English comprehension, are you incompetent in understanding the statistical content of Jones’s statement, or are you a simple liar?
[DC: All reasonable questions, but Cam MacKay will have to answer them somewhere else. Not that I expect him to. ]

The 44-year-old contrarian, who argues that spending billions on reducing CO2 emissions is a waste of money, has thrown his weight behind a wheeze to create vast clouds that would reflect the sun’s energy back into space …

“There are several problems,” said Jonathan Leake, science editor of The Sunday Times. “By its experimental nature, we can’t be sure it would work. We would be committing ourselves to the recurring cost of maintaining an enormous fleet of boats in perpetuity.

“The idea also ignores the second main element of CO2 emissions. It doesn’t combat the problem of ocean acidification – what happens when the CO2 which we emit dissolves in the ocean and makes it more acidic. The oceans are changing so rapidly that in 50 or 60 years’ time there will be parts where shellfish can’t survive.”

Morano is the scariest of any of them in a way. He’s too jumpy even for Fox on a regular basis, but the fact that he has a receptive audience at all makes me worried. McIntyre et al are just paid liars, but this guy Morano is a stone cold lunatic.

In the hope that these might be useful to some readers for rebutting the misinformation in the UK and US press, following are the references I used to convince a San Francisco Bay area radio host/blog author to remove from his blog Leake’s Feb. 14, 2010 TimesOnline article, “World may not be warming, say ‘scientists’” [italics added, based on the absence of actual scientific sources to support the headline]:

Item 2 is also interesting because it identifies an on-line magazine, American Thinker, as an emerging popular denialist propaganda source that Dr. Christy prefers to use instead of peer-reviewed journals for defending his shoddy research and launching unsupportable claims of misconduct against reputable scientists like Ben Santer.

Item 3 specifically responds to false claims about the purported bias of surface temperature measurements raised by non-scientists such as Anthony Watts (who is inaccurately cited as a “meteorologist” in Leake’s TimesOnline article), and shows that such claims are unfounded.

Not sure if this was a “first,” but I heard both the Leake article “World may not be warming” and Petre article “No warming since 1995″ propagated on my local (San Francisco Bay area) public radio station on Sunday, Feb. 14, between 11-12 am PST. I wish I could say it will be the last time our public radio station goes astray, but unfortunately that’s not likely. At least it wasn’t an NPR broadcast this time; it was just a susceptible local radio personality who made the error and hopefully, he learned not to repeat it. There is ample evidence, however, that NPR is not immune to such misinformation.

It seems to me that John Christy’s failure to correct a known error in one of his published research papers, and his baseless, apparently retaliatory allegations of misconduct against another scientist, Ben Santer (Santer v Douglass Christy et al. 03 Feb 2010), should in themselves be grounds for an investigation of misconduct on Dr. Christy’s part. Does UAH have any standards in this regard?

I’m not sure that there are any rules covering informal accusations of this sort. But if the allegations and proffered facts are false and defamatory (and it appears that at least some may well have been), then there should be recourse via libel laws. ]

The Phil Jones mis-quoted comment about ‘no statistically-significant global warming’ has also been reported in Australia. In yesterday’s Sydney Telegraph climate sceptic Piers Akerman said that ‘Phil Jones has admitted there has been no statistically significant warming in the past 15 years’. (Looks like he may have done a bit of copying & pasting – as most denialist journalists seem to do).

Here’s a funny coincidence:Before his current gig, paid for by CFACT, Morano worked for Sen. Inhofe’s EPW.
By amusing coincidence, his start date was 06/14/06, several days before the Wegman Report came out.

After reading that I felt better about the world, then I made the mistake of reading some of the comments. OMG. He must have hit the nail on the head b/c those in denial are fuming.

[DC: Sachs is not a journalist; he’s director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Still I find it enormously encouraging that a major newspaper is willing to run a critique of another newspaper’s role in this ongoing propaganda campaign. ]

Oops, Morano started about a month before Wegman Report,, sorry. But still interesting. I have so many dates & people flying around right now, I dopr soem bits.
[DC: That’s right – the Barton hearings were in mid-July, 2006.

I think it took a while for Morano to set up his PR machine at epw.senate.gov, but presumably his disinformation email blasts started before that. ]

Derech064, something similar happened to me after I wrote a letter to the editor of our (right wing) newspaper. I received an abusive e-mail from one of the local deniers (he cc’d FOS principals) .

It seems as if some one at the newspaper was leaking e-mail addresses to him since the e-mail had his company address but had been forwarded from one he had received from the paper.

I also must be on the paper’s black list since I have not had a letter published for some time now. I have one in at the moment concerning a recent op-ed by right winger Susan Martinuk on the Jones interview. I will see if it gets published.

Ian, IMO your story is most disturbing. FOS and Tom Harris have also been trying to intimidate others. Hopefully DC will speak to this sometime, especially now that this new piece of evidence has come to light.

Let me guess, you wrote a letter to the Calgary Herald? Is there any clue as to who at the newspaper leaked your email address? What was the paper’s email address in the offensive email? This to me is a very serious breach of confidentiality on the newspaper’s part, and the newspaper in question is enabling aggressive and threatening behaviour, so it should perhaps be followed up with the police…

Ian, I’d like to hook up if at all possible. Not sure how that works though. Maybe DC could help if you are interested. No worries if you are not.

I am working on a sequel for my prior piece on deniers, and wonder if you can provide the same kind of evidence about Pielke Jr. and The Breakthrough Institute that you did about McIntyre. Their troughs are all a bit disguised, but they need your kind of flashlight, especially since they are feigning high ground with my editor. If you or anyone else has thoughts on this, I can be reached at mike.greenframe@gmail.com.

The latest Newsweek fiasco just made me more determined.
[DC: Although I haven’t covered RP jr much here, my views on his error-filled climate science blatherings and his despicable attacks on climate scientists are fairly well documented at other blogs (including some bouts of pig-wrestling at RP jr’s own blog).

However, I haven’t looked much at TBI, and I would say Anna Haynes and Steve Bloom are way ahead of me on this. I don’t know if you caught this thread at Stoat:

Speaking of the Fraser Institute, can you believe that the Vermont State ClimatologistSTILL has the Fraser Institute document Understanding Climate Change listed as the first link in her climate change articles & resources section?

This after my phone calls and emails to her dept. Chair and the president of the American Association of State Climatologists made several months ago.

Sheesh! Is there no shame and no oversight?

[DC: I feel your pain. Mind you, it took years to close down the University of Calgary professor Barry Cooper’s bogus “research” fund (actually a conduit for Friends of Science projects run by APCO Workdwide and other PR pros). Much patience is required, apparently. ]

Scott Mandia
“A weather forecaster is a weather predictor and I teach my freshman non-science majors how to do this.”

And interesting side note is that any decent mariner can do the same thing, provided he has read his ‘bible of boating’ – “Chapmans Piloting Seamanship and Small Boat Handling” and has access to weather fax and his own observations.

That would make every mariner a climate change expert, if the denialsphere is to be believed.